The standardization of communication protocols and data formats have permitted the World-Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet to revolutionize the manner in which electronic communications occur. Web browsers (equipped with the appropriate external viewer plugins) such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, and the like facilitate the viewing of various data formats on display screens. Further, external viewers such as Adobe Acrobat and the like, may facilitate viewing data formats on display screens independent of web browsers. Moreover, there are a variety of data formats not directed to viewing data directly on a display screen but, rather, directed to formatting electronic data prior to delivering the data to another device (e.g. printer, and the like). Additionally, a variety of translation or software languages permit data formats to be converted from one data format to another, or permit data formats to be enhanced in some way by altering the presentation of the data when displayed. Some of these translation languages and data formats include by way of example only, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), PostScript (PS), Portable Document Format (PDF), Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), Printer Control Language (PCL), Extended Markup Language (XML), Extended Stylesheets Language (XSL), Wireless Markup Language (WML), and the like.
Furthermore, a wide variety of data formats permits defining non-text data types, these data type definitions allow viewing graphics, images, video, audio (listening), and the like. Recently, many viewers (made operable with traditional browser via plugins) have been developed to permit the displaying of data formats on any communications device, such as wireless phones, hand-held computing devices, car computing devices, appliances, stand alone printers, digital video, digital cameras, and the like.
Recent industry consortiums have attempted to further revolutionize the area of data delivery and presentation by creating an industry data format from XML which divorces data content descriptions from data presentation layouts. In other words, XML is an open industry standard for defining and separating the data content from the data presentation. Such a standard permits more efficient electronic communications and transactions, by permitting users to transmit data back and forth even while each user potentially views the data in entirely different data formats, with customized data presentation layouts distinct for each user.
For example, a local user having a data viewer that does not support a PDF data format but, rather, a MICROSOFT WORD data format receives a data transmission in XML data format from a remote user. The remote user's data are stored in an XML data format and used by the remote user in a PDF data viewer, by using a translator which presents the XML data to the remote user in a PDF data format compatible with the PDF data viewer. When the remote user sends these data to the local user, the XML data format is sent and not the PDF data format. The local user receives the XML data format and translates it to MICROSOFT WORD compatible with the local user's data viewer. In this way, disparate viewing data formats become transparent to the users, who use his/her own viewing data formats.
Moreover, these data formats have translators/parsers which permit data to be delivered in a variety of presentation (layout) formats on display devices. For example, Extended Stylesheets Language Transformations (XSLT) permits easy manipulation of XML documents to create a wide variety of customizable layout styles and data presentations.
Yet, manipulating data formats and customizing document layouts for display devices, printing devices, and other devices are problematic because often a document needs to populate a specific output layout and, therefore, providing this layout for a wide variety of disparate data types such as text, graphics, images, footnotes, audio, video and the like, generates a significant amount of data presentation errors. The result is that although a data format was translated from one format to a format useable by a requesting user, the resulting display of that translated data is of almost of no value to the requesting user because the translator used to provide the layout could not adequately address how disparate data types co-exist on the rendered electronic media. These complex layouts are often somewhat better handled by batch programming utilities which can store and better calculate how a document layout is to appear when being translated from one format to another format. Yet, even these batch programming utilities still largely perform canned operations which result in the layout or presentation of the translated data being largely corrupted from the original data format.